PCs break the $200 barrier

Gary "crazy guy" Krakow takes a look at a cheap new PC. Or does he? The real story here, actually, is that this thing is running a Google-oriented version of Ubuntu called gOS. That makes it much more interesting than just the low-ball pricing:

Beginning today, Wal-Mart is selling a brand new computer for $199.

Everex calls their new Green gPC an alternative personal computer which runs on Linux – a free operating system. Its name implies it’s an alternative to more expensive devices which run on Microsoft Windows or Apple’s operating system.

The gPC uses Ubuntu Linux, which is a free, open-source operating system. I’ve been testing Ubuntu on a number of different computers – old and new – for the past few months and I highly recommend it.

Everex added a green, graphical desktop and calls the result the gOS. The screen features oversized icons and a large, horizontal navigation bar with easy-to-understand icons for Web sites and free, installed software including the Mozilla Web browser, Skype and the OpenOffice suite plus links to YouTube and Wikipedia.

There also are a large number of Google-labeled links such as Google Search, Google Documents, Google Spreadsheets, Google Calendar, Google News, Google Maps, Google Products Search and Gmail. One might guess that gPC actually stand for Google instead of Green PC based on the number of Google links bundled on the desktop, but Everex says that’s isn’t the case.

As for the hardware, the gPC runs on a 1.5 GHz Via processor as opposed to the more prevalent Intel or AMD chips and 512MB of memory. The combination is quite speedy.